Armenian opposition leaders on Thursday urged Moscow to stop doing business with Armenia’s government as they rallied supporters during Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s visit to Yerevan.
Mirroring exchange rate fluctuations in Russia, Armenia’s national currency, the dram, has strengthened significantly during the continuing war in Ukraine.
Armenian opposition leaders accused the European Union on Tuesday of turning a blind eye to the excessive use of force by police against protesters demanding Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s resignation.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian again claimed to have turned Armenia into an established democracy on Friday as the country's main opposition groups continued daily demonstrations demanding his resignation.
Riot police on Thursday refrained from mass arrests of participants of daily opposition demonstrations in Yerevan aimed at forcing Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian to resign.
The Armenian police attempted to arrest their former chief on Friday as he participated in continuing anti-government protests organized by the country’s leading opposition groups.
Senior pro-government lawmakers on Thursday urged the Armenian military to call up men participating in continuing opposition demonstrations aimed at forcing Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian to resign.
Armenia’s leading opposition alliances began on Monday coordinated small-scale demonstrations in Yerevan in preparation for mass protests aimed at toppling Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian.
Armenia has started paying for natural gas imported from Russia in rubles, Economy Minister Vahan Kerobian said at the end of a visit to Moscow late on Thursday.
Armenian economic growth will slow down considerably and inflation will remain high this year due to knock-on effects of Western sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, according to the Central Bank of Armenia (CBA).
The already slow pace of vaccinations in Armenia has continued to drop in recent weeks amid falling numbers of new coronavirus cases reported by health authorities there.
Citing regional and global spillovers from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has revised downwards its forecast for Armenia’s economic growth from 4.5 percent to 1.5 percent this year.
Thousands of Russians, many of them tech professionals, have migrated to Armenia since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing tightening of Western sanctions against Moscow.
Armenia’s national currency, the dram, has weakened against the U.S. dollar by more than 5 percent since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Armenia’s energy regulator on Tuesday raised the retail prices of natural gas by an average of 4.1 percent, a move that should further increase the cost of living in the country.
Greenhouse owners in Armenia have warned that rising prices of electricity and natural gas will further push up the cost of their agricultural produce and could also drive many of them out of business.
Health authorities pledged on Thursday to again boost capacity at Armenia’s hospitals to cope with the latest surge in coronavirus cases driven by the Omicron variant.
The Armenian government has sought to justify a widely anticipated increase in the retail prices of natural gas in the country.
Nearly 16,000 residents of Nagorno-Karabakh displaced by the 2020 war with Azerbaijan continue to live in temporary shelters or homes, a senior official in Stepanakert said on Tuesday.
The Armenian government has set up a task force that will coordinate work on a railway that will connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave through Armenia’s Syunik province.
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